format: 16-bit CD
performance: 7.5
sound: 8
released: 2007
label: Hear Music/MPL
reviewer: Stephen K. Peeples
When The Beatles' LOVE collection was released in 2006, the college-age staff at a busy chain bookstore played the album on the in-store sound system nine times, back to back. I heard about this from my son, a store manager in his early 20s who grew up to share his dad’s fondness for the Fabs, their songs, and their studio innovations. Most of my son’s young staff were Beatles fans too, especially the ones working in the music department.
When Sir Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full album was released June 5, 2007, my son told me later, the bookstore staff played it only twice. They thought it sucked so badly the first time, they played the 13-song CD again just to be sure. After the second play, they unanimously ordered it ...

format: 16-bit CD + 5.1 DVD-Audio/Video (2 Disc)
performance: 9.9
sound: 9.9
release year: 2006
label: Apple/Capitol/Cirque de Soleil
reviewed by: Stephen K. Peeples
There was palpable panic in Pepperland in 2005 when hard-core Beatles fans heard about the Beatles/Cirque du Soleil collaboration to produce a big budget, multi-media live-theatre extravaganza in Las Vegas based on Beatles songs and using the band’s actual original recordings (gasp!).
Historically, the surviving Beatles and their Apple organization have been very aggressive in protecting the sanctity of the band’s original recordings. So you’d figure the survivors wouldn’t start tarnishing the brand now.
Actually, the Beatles-Cirque connection got started several years ago when auto racing gearheads George Harrison and Cirque founder Guy Laliberte met on the circuit and became friends. Eventually Apple, Beatles and survivors all signed off on Laliberte’s Vegas concept.
They worked closely with Cirque’s Head of Creation Gilles Ste-Croix and show ...

format: 16-bit CD
performance: 8.5
sound: 9
release year: 2006
label: Shangri-La
reviewed by: Stephen K. Peeples
In summer 2001, philanthropist-producer Steve Bing and music producer Jimmy Rip got Sun Records rock and roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis out of his pajamas and back into the studio in Memphis, where he began sessions for this album of 21 Killer-styled duets performed with longtime friends and rock and roll acolytes.
As the work was in progress – with an all-A-list lineup of backing players at Phillips Recording Studio, run by original Sun founder/producer Sam Phillips, and at modern-day Sun Studios and other facilities (or even hotel rooms) as the logistics (and certain Stones) necessitated – pioneering Sun rockabilly king Johnny Cash died. Then Phillips checked out, too.
Original and long-time Jerry Lee fans who’d heard about these ongoing sessions – rock and roll Lewis’ first new, released studio album ...

format: 16-bit CD
performance: 8
sound: 8.5
release year: 2006
label: Stony Plain
reviewed by: Stephen K. Peeples
oronto-born Jeff Healey earned kudos from his peers and a fair amount of cash from the record-buying public in the ‘80s and ’90s as a blues-rockin’ guitar slinger with a singular style he developed by playing a Fender Strat stretched flat across his lap.
If that’s your point of reference for Healey, you might find this third album and first live set released by Healey’s Dixieland band, the Jazz Wizards, a big surprise. It’s a wild but ultimately rewarding flashback to the birth of New Orleans jazz, which is no mean feat for a bunch of guys who grew up and live more than 1,100 miles north of the Big Easy, and in a completely different culture.
Healey, blind due to eye cancer in 1967 at age one, started ...